Review - Late Night With The Devil

 Late Night With The Devil (2024)

Director: Cameron Cairnes, Colin Cairnes

Writer: Cameron Cairnes, Colin Cairnes

Stars: David Dastmalchian, Laura Gordon, Ian Bliss

Where to Watch: In Theaters (On Shudder in April)

Synopsis: A live television broadcast in 1977 goes horribly wrong, unleashing evil into the nation's living rooms.

Thoughts: It isn't often I walk away from a movie and say, "This would have been a perfect movie if only they changed this one thing". But I feel strongly about it. And it's a shame no one asked me. 

There's a lot crammed into this story. It begins as kind of a 60 Minutes news profile on late night host Jack Delroy, and his show's Halloween episode that shocked the nation. The movie is both found footage and a "broadcast" of that episode. There's some questionable logistics of how they filmed the behind the scenes footage for the "found footage" elements, especially when much of it was secret conversations between various people, but hey, movie magic I guess. But for the most part, it's just a riveting, entertaining movie, that holds itself to the ins and outs of shooting a tv show, and all the breaks they have to do for "a word from our sponsor". It makes the film feel like it's on a time crunch and the clock is always ticking and you've got 30 seconds and now we're back, hello, and now for our next guest. 

It's not a particularly scary movie. It's got a lot of scenes that are meant to unsettle us, and they work to a degree, but nothing outright scary happens until the climax of the movie. And let me tell you, that climax, it was pretty spectacular. I guess I wanted more of that, more of that sweet, sweet carnage candy. But while it may have been brief, it's certainly memorable. There's a lot of hinting at a certain plot point throughout the movie that I thought was subtle and done pretty well. The audience gets the point. We're smart like that. But then in the climax of the movie they really just lay it all out for us, showing us scene by scene, and what a disappointment. I'd rather a movie assume its audience is smart, rather than like children that need to be guiding by a held hand. It's really my only gripe. It goes from a shocking scene that we'd all been waiting for, to a series of exposition imagery that really took me out of the zone.

When all is said and done though - it was a completely original, entertaining movie that I will no doubt watch again and again.

4 out of 5 💀s